Re: Macros and Token Filters Revisited

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 5:50 PM, Jerome Vuarand
<jerome.vuarand@gmail.com> wrote:
> the filter). So chaining filters may be of little use, unless the
> upstream filter is more laxist (ie. let go through token chains that
> the compiler wouldn't accept).

That's the basic problem - there are no guarantees that chaining
arbitrary filters will work, and the results would often be
order-dependent. It would very much be a 'caveat emptor' situation.

> While saving bytecode reduces portability, what prevents you from
> re-serializing the output of the token filter in source form ?

Nothing, actually. There are a few straight source-to-source macro
systems for Lua already; I've always preferred the direct token-filter
approach because there's no separate compile step, but not a bad way
to solve the distribution problem.

One thing that doesn't get carried over with a source translation
would be original line numbers.

steve d.